Re: comments on draft-py-multi6-gapi-00.txt

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Joe Abley wrote:

> Interconnecting countries in South Asia and other developing regions is
> most definitely a governmental policy issue, and not a technical issue
> (the technical case for direct interconnection is trivial, and yet
> there is no direct interconnection). It might take governments twenty
> years to decide that fibre across the land border is a good idea, or
> they might not decide to do it at all.

Both goverments and business make bad decisions at times. Only
governments usually need more time to make them.

However, there may not be a technical case for interconnection. Here in
the Netherlands around 45% of all traffic is to the US (this includes
stuff that is only reachable through the US), 45% is domestic and 10% to
the rest of Europe. Obviously these aren't very hard figures, but each
time I checked it was pretty close. Under these circumstances it doesn't
make much sense for non-huge networks to have direct connections to
neighboring countries: reserving some extra capacity on the US link
makes much more sense as it is virtually free, no extra effort and
better burstability. Now recompute with much higher costs for links to
neighboring countries and lots of government intervention.

> Any routing system that relies on (geopolitically) local
> interconnection better be able to accommodate frequent departures from
> that model. There are a lot of people in South Asia, and the
> infrastructure is growing a lot faster than governments are able to
> think, never mind legislate.

In the US there isn't much local interconnection as not much traffic
stays local. In most other countries, much more traffic stays local
because the countries are usually simply smaller and because of language
barriers. So now we have examples with little local interconnection and
examples with little regional interconnection. I'm still waiting for
examples of significant internet use with no local OR regional
interconnection.

Not that any of this is of practical importance with regard to the
decisions we are facing.